In Search of Progress: Female Academics after Jane Eyre

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë’s novel about a female educator, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. This current paper asks: what progress has been enjoyed by female academics since Charlotte’s day? Although women are no longer disbarred from academia, there is international evidence that women in higher education experience gender discrimination both as students and academics. This paper therefore borrows from Jane Eyre to define “progress” as the recognition that women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer” (Brontë, 2006, pp. 129-130). It questions the extent of this progress by asking ten female academics working in four UK universities to respond to quotations from Jane Eyre read in conjunction with recent media stories about education and gender. Some participants claimed that women may be antagonistic towards female academics who defy notions of domesticity, while other participants appeared resistant to the idea that discrimination exists. This paper argues that, together, these beliefs normalise career stagnation as the “natural” outcome of women’s alleged biological preference for non-agentic behaviour and risk isolating women who are wounded by discrimination. This study suggests that progress requires the universal rejection of culturally imposed limitations to the exercise of women’s faculties.

References

Asimaki, A., Zenzefilis, V. & Koustouraki, G. (2016). The access and development of female academics in the university field in Greece: University of Patras case study. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 4, 150-162.

Barker, J. (2001). The Brontës. London: Phoenix Press.

Barker, J. (2006). The Brontës: A life in letters. London: The Folio Society.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License of their choice (usually CCBY 3.0 unported, but determined at the proofing stage by consultation with the Editor - readers looking for copyright permissions are required to do this on a case by case basis) that allows others to share the work in some way with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. We appreciate authors placing a link to the Other Education site wherever they choose to offer a PDF download to the original OE article.